I entertain myself, researching events happening out there in the Real World, from the relative safety of my little Daily Post office in downtown Pagosa Springs.
Reportedly, demand for petroleum-based fuels is expected to recover later this year, after falling by 9% during 2020. Reportedly. The data and predictions come mainly from the oil industry itself, so we have to wonder how accurate they are.
From the International Energy Agency, December 2020:
In the short term, oil demand remains weak and we have reduced our estimate for the fourth quarter of 2020 by 0.2 million barrels per day on small data revisions in various countries… The recovery in the second half of 2020 is almost entirely due to China’s fast rebound from lockdown. Demand there will grow by 0.7 mb/d in the period. The picture in OECD countries is bleak…
…Almost entirely due to China’s fast rebound from lockdown. The picture in OECD countries is bleak…
I vaguely recognized the acronym “OECD” but wasn’t sure exactly what it meant.
“The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development is an intergovernmental economic organization with 37 member countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade… a forum of countries describing themselves as committed to democracy and the market economy… Generally, OECD members are high-income economies with a very high Human Development Index (HDI) and are regarded as developed countries…”
Does Pagosa Springs have a “very high Human Development Index (HDI)”?
The “HDI” was devised and launched by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq in 1990, with the explicit purpose “to shift the focus of development economics from national income accounting to people-centered policies”. Dr. Haq believed that a simple composite measure of human development was needed to convince the public, academics, and politicians that they can and should evaluate development not only by economic advances but also by improvements in human well-being.
Previous to 1990, “progress” was measured (by the people who profess to measure such things) mainly in terms of Gross Domestic Product or Gross National Income — the raw amount of money created by a nation’s activities. Dr. Haq devised a clever measurement system that included “life expectancy” and “educational opportunities”.
His system does not, however, measure how equally or universally that income, or education, or life expectancy, is distributed. We know it’s a problem, but we don’t really want to measure it, I guess.
The HDI does not measure the amount of damage — pollution, homelessness, famine, war, suicide, corruption, isolation, environmental destruction, or mental health issues — created by any given economic and political system. We’ll have to wait for a future economist to develop that particular measuring system. Then we might be able to determine how “developed” our little mountain community has truly become.
Until then, we are guessing. We know with some certainty that Archuleta County residents currently contribute relatively little in the way of environmental destruction. We have no heavy industry. Our mining activities are limited to gravel extraction and a few oil and gas wells west of town. Our forests have remained largely free of human-caused wildfires and logging activities.
Yes, we are almost all driving gasoline-powered cars and spewing exhaust gases into the atmosphere, but most of us probably drive less than 50 miles a day.
But… maybe 50 miles a day isn’t something to celebrate?
From a study published by AAA (American Automobile Association) in 2015:
On average, Americans drive 29.2 miles per day, making two trips with an average total duration of 46 minutes…
The average distance and time spent driving increase in relation to higher levels of education. A driver with a grade school or some high school education drove an average of 19.9 miles and 32 minutes daily, while a college graduate drove an average of 37.2 miles and 58 minutes…
Drivers who reported living “in the country” or “a small town” drive greater distances (12,264 miles annually) and spend a greater amount of time driving than people who described living in a “medium sized town” or city (9,709 miles annually)…
Living in a small town, “in the country”, in a mostly-suburban social landscape, we may be delivering more than our fair share of pollutants and carbon dioxide into the air. And we may have developed more road miles per capita than a “medium-sized town or city”. According to the US Department of Transportation, the state of Colorado has about 89,000 miles of public roads. That’s about 16 miles of public road per 1,000 residents.
If Archuleta County had 16 miles of public roads per 1,000 residents, we’d have about 220 miles of public roads.
In fact, we have 320 miles of County road, 170 miles of Forest Service road, 72 miles of state highways, and 20 miles of Town streets, maintained for the benefit of 14,000 full-time residents. According to my pocket calculator, that comes to 582 miles of public roads…or about 42 miles of roads per person… in need of annual maintenance.
That’s seems to be greater maintenance burden that the one faced by the state of Colorado, overall.
This editorial series has discussed the steadily declining demand for oil facing us in the near future, the oil company bankruptcies we can expect over the next several years, and — somewhat on the periphery — the transition to electric vehicles. I see no feasible way that Pagosa Springs can dig itself out of the “suburban sprawl” land use pattern that has defined our community’s development since the early 1970s. I see our community continuing to struggle with a declining road infrastructure, as our County government goes ever more deeply into debt building and maintaining new County facilities.
I could be wrong. Recent reports from the real estate industry suggest that the median home price last year was around $400,000. That number implies higher property taxes for everyone during the third decade of the 21st century. Maybe our well-funded government employees can figure out ways to maintain three times the miles of road — per capita — that Colorado as a whole must maintain.
And maybe, in this small corner of the globe, automobiles will continue to rule the roost.